Emotional Intelligence and the Experience of Aging in the Fiction of Julian Barnes

This paper explores the concept of emotional intelligence in relation to the experience of aging in the fiction of Julian Barnes. Barnes’s novels present aging as a period of emotional reassessment rather than decline. Focusing primarily on The Sense of an Ending, the paper examines how emotional intelligence—self-awareness, empathy, emotional regulation, and moral responsibility—develops in later life (Goleman 34). Barnes portrays aging characters who revisit their memories and confront emotional failures of youth, revealing how emotional immaturity shapes identity and relationships (Barnes 41). The paper argues that emotional intelligence in Barnes’s fiction is not an innate quality but a gradual and often painful achievement emerging through reflection, guilt, and moral reckoning. By linking aging with emotional growth, Barnes offers a humanistic understanding of psychological well-being and ethical maturity.